Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus: Prostitution and Religious Obedience in The Bible (2016): written and illustrated by Chester Brown: Canadian writer-artist Chester Brown (Louis Riel, Ed the Happy Clown) continues his love affair with prostitution in Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus. Brown's previous full-length work detailed his years of hiring prostitutes in Paying for It while also offering a lengthy and detailed argument for why prostitution should be decriminalized (but not legalized) in Canada.
Here, the eccentric and occasionally infuriating genius looks to the Bible for support of his belief that prostitution is spiritually sanctioned by the Judeo-Christian God and Jesus. He does this in a series of adaptations of Old and New Testament stories, all supported by a whoppingly big appendix/afterword outlining his argument, primary sources, and secondary sources.
Along the way, Brown also argues that God and Jesus were both highly supportive of rebels -- specifically, those who were religiously disobedient. It's all very interesting, and the stories themselves are beautifully and simply drawn. Brown's art has never been so perfectly and deceptively simple.
As a religious and philosophical argument, though, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus could be used to teach a specific type of fallacious reasoning. Brown's arguments about religious obedience basically require him to focus exclusively on the instances in which God or Jesus act in such a way as to support his argument -- incidents in which this is not so are either skimmed over or avoided entirely. Scholars who disagree with him are cited in the appendix only as straw men to be demolished. It's a rigged game of argumentation, and seductively convincing until one twigs to it.
Brown's unstinting support of prostitution can almost go without comment here -- it's the same one as in Paying for It, now deployed with Biblical support for the spiritual awesomeness of paid sex, all of it channeled through Brown's deployment of a long-standing theological argument that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was a prostitute and that Christ was conceived during an incident of purchased sex.
In Brown's world, sex shouldn't be regulated in any way by the government -- hence decriminalization and not legalization. And all problems associated with prostitution, most prominently all the physical dangers to prostitutes from STD's to sex slavery, are a result of the criminalization of prostitution and not prostitution itself.
So here we are with yet another brilliant, frustrating, infuriating comic from Chester Brown. I'd actually have liked more comics -- the graphic-novel portion is almost equaled in length by the appendix, and as much as I enjoy Brown's appendices, it's his cartooning I want.
One of the other philosophical oddities of the text comes with Brown's argument that God/Jesus want people to disobey him. As Brown expands upon this concept in the appendix, complete with a bonus adaptation of the Book of Job, something weird happens. A concept that has its roots in Liberation Theology (thanks, Paul Meahan) mutates in Brown's argument into something almost Satanic: God's message to humanity, like Aleister Crowley's message, is 'Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.' Though Brown's God (like XTC) probably appends 'unless you hurt someone.'
So go out and buy this book. It's great. It works even better if one has read Paying for It, but that's not a necessary read -- just another good one. Whether or not one agrees with Brown in whole or in part, he's a talent who delivers fine cartooning and thought-provoking arguments. Long may he run. Highly recommended.
The Little Man: Collected Short Pieces 1980-1995 written and illustrated by Chester Brown (1973-2006/ This revised edition 2006): Canada's most lovable, prickly, occasionally misanthropic cartoonist collects a decade-and-a-half of short pieces here, along with new notes on the origins and meanings of those short pieces.
Chester Brown also spends a fair bit of space writing about the significance of Doug Wright's Family in the End Notes. Truly, Chester is Canadian, born and raised in an Anglo Montreal suburb but more identified with Toronto, his home for much of the last 35 years.
The Little Man offers a pretty useful guide to the changes in Brown's cartooning interests over the 15 years covered by the book. His early work consisted of often grotesque, boundary-pushing fantasy and absurdism, embodied by his Ed the Clown series. Shorter pieces included here show that grotesque cartoony portion of Brown's body of work, with some very funny pieces and some of the more disturbing short horror pieces to ever appear in comic form.
Indeed, the horror pieces involving funny animals Gerbil and Bunny become even more disturbing (as Brown acknowledges in his notes) when one discovers that 'Gerbil' and 'Bunny' were the pet names Brown and one girlfriend had for one another at the time the pieces were created. And around the same time, Brown was working on an illustrated story of Jesus from which we get an outlier -- a Gnostic story of Jesus and his twin. This is range, folks.
Brown would get bored with fiction as the 1980's waned, turning instead to often painfully honest and closely observed chronicles of his own life. But he'd also become interested in comics as a vehicle for historical and social observation. Sometimes he melded general discussions with the personal. Here, Brown discusses theories about schizophrenia in concert with a discussion of his own mother's struggles with schizophrenia; we would see this structure again in the graphic novel Paying For It. Brown would also do a relatively 'straightforward' historical graphic novel in the oughts, Louis Riel, but even that meshed at points in the text with the piece about his mother's schizophrenia through Brown's discussion in the notes of his theories about madness, whether that madness was Riel's or his mother's.
In the short pieces, one also sees the changes in Brown's artwork. He becomes looser and more adept at a simplicity of linework as time goes by. Nonetheless, it's all of a piece artistically, even the very early stuff. The Notes are generous in their contextualization of the works, and in Brown's deadpan, prickly self-evaluation. He will pick his nose. He will eat it. He will draw it. He will publish that drawing. And you will go, 'Eeww!'. Highly recommended.
Paying for It: written and illustrated by Chester Brown (2011): This autobiographical comic from Toronto's own Chester Brown (Yummy Fur, Ed the Clown, Louis Riel) details more than a decade of Brown paying for 'it' -- 'it' being sex. Paying for It is certainly not salacious: Brown strips his style down to near-minimalism, limiting the eroticism. We observe meetings with more than 25 prostitutes over the years. Worried about 'outing' any of the women, Brown neither shows faces nor, as he notes in the introduction, gets too specific with the details of what they talked about. The conversations with the assorted prostitutes are therefore more of a representative amalgamation of more general observations and opinions offered in different encounters.
The book is really more of a philosophical exploration of Brown's libertarian-based views on prostitution, offered to the reader through both Brown's internal monologues and his conversations with friends that include fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth and former Bob's Your Uncle frontwoman and Muchmusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee, Brown's girlfriend at the beginning of the book, which starts in 1997.
As noted, the graphics are minimalist, and represent some of Brown's cleanest linework. They're also quite funny at times. As Robert Crumb notes in his introduction, Chester Brown the cartoon character has a face that never changes expression regardless of the situation. Over the course of the book this becomes quite droll even as it offers a commentary on Brown's own apparent emotional reserve.
Complete with lengthy notes and an appendix, Paying for It offers a pretty convincing argument for decriminalizing prostitution in Canada without legalizing it (which is to say, without the government regulating it). Brown's sweeping generalizations can become exhausting every once in awhile (he really, really hates romantic love) as certain elements, especially his arguments against romantic love, get stated and re-stated over the course of 300 pages.
The strongest element of Paying for It remains Brown's depictions of the encounters with the prostitutes, all of which have the absolute and minutely observed status of engaging and rewarding verisimilitude regardless of the edits and conflations and omissions Brown chose to make to protect the identity of the women. Highly recommended.
